Oregon’s beloved annual Pickathon Music Festival, which runs Friday, Aug. 1 - 3, 2025 at Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley, once again features a brand-new, temporary performance venue created by Portland State University School of Architecture’s Design-Build studio, made entirely from Douglas fir dimensional lumber and other building materials that will be reused following the festival — leaving no waste behind.
“The Water Serpent,” the students’ name for this year’s Cherry Hill Stage, is a serpentine structure that encircles the audience and stage platform, creating a porous perimeter that delineates the performance area while inviting festivalgoers to flow in and out. The shaded, meandering corridor beckons audience members to move under and through it, or rest on modular slatted benches that are positioned artfully beneath. Cooling shade and movement is provided by a halo of more than a hundred strips of burlap from coffee sacks, which gracefully billow and flutter in the breeze, evoking the shimmering gills of a rainbow trout.
The sprawling site design incorporates space for a “green room” backstage area, audio equipment around and on the stage, and areas for audience members to linger along the edges and watch the musicians on stage or enjoy a meal from one of the many food vendors nearby.
Taking inspiration from the image of a snake digesting a meal and resting along the hillside, the PSU architecture students designed the structured walkway so that it is wider in some areas and narrower in others. The elevation of the structure traces the gentle slope of the hill as it encircles the stage, reflecting the undulating terrain of Pendarvis Farm.
"During the initial phases, we knew we wanted to create an intimate space that celebrated the performers, but also offered a connection between the stage, the crowd and the festival at large," stated the Diversion Design-Build team. “It was clear that many of us were interested in the idea of representing fauna or wildlife, in some way, shape or form, while playing with scale."
The 32-foot-tall structure is made from more than 500 pieces of two-by-six and two-by-four Douglas fir lumber, crowned by more than 400 burlap coffee-sack flags, and dynamically illuminated by dozens of LED lights when the sun goes down.
“Designing and building ‘The Water Serpent’ was a chance to create something poetic and alive — when the wind catches the high burlap layers and the light filters through, the whole structure feels like it’s breathing,” said Master of Architecture student Nati Ochoa. “Watching people move through it and respond to the rhythm and atmosphere we created has been one of the most powerful parts of my architectural education.”
Located where the woods meet the meadow, the Cherry Hill “neighborhood” is a magical performance environment for some 30 bands and DJs that will play there throughout the weekend, including Fruit Bats, Surprise Chef and PSU alum Haley Heynderickx. The Cherry Hill venue is one of nine performance areas that make up the weekend festival.
In keeping with the diversion design-build concept established by professors Clive Knights and Travis Bell in 2014, when PSU Architecture and Pickathon began their annual collaboration, all of the materials used to build the stage and environment will be reused in other projects after the festival. The Douglas fir lumber is slated to be reused in Portland Public Schools shop programs and as part of a classroom structure on the PSU Oak Savanna. After the festival, the burlap textile fabric is intended for use as a natural form of weed control in community gardens.
“Typically, architectural education takes place in the studio, and is primarily conceptual in nature,” said Travis Bell, the project’s faculty lead. “The Pickathon diversion design-build partnership offers our students a truly valuable learning experience that is rare in architectural education: they get to participate in every step of the entire building process, from the first spark of imagination to design, to construction, and finally to completion. In real-world projects like this, a lot of hands-on learning takes place outside of the studio, and having that experience behind them is a huge benefit to students as they graduate and move into their design careers.”
Past Pickathon diversion design-build stages created by PSU School of Architecture students have been created from the following materials, before being returned to industrial use or put to a new purpose:
- 2014: Wooden shipping pallets
- 2015: Giant cardboard tubes (typically used for wrapping and transporting sheet steel; see Oregonian article)
- 2016: Dimensional lumber
- 2017: Wooden trusses (which were later used to build sleeping pods for the Clackamas County Veterans Village; see Bloomberg CityLab article)
- 2018: Dimensional lumber (used later on for infrastructure [planters, benches, and screening elements] at new Kenton Women's Village)
- 2019: Apple harvesting bins lent by fruit harvesters (see ArchDaily article)
- 2022: Giant wooden electric-cable reels borrowed from Portland General Electric
- 2023 & 2024: Dimensional lumber (used later in the PSU Oak Savanna and Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge program)
PSU Architecture-designed Pickathon stages have been featured by the Oregonian, Oregon Public Broadcasting, ArchDaily, Architects Newspaper, Archinect, Bloomberg CityLab and other outlets, and have won multiple awards from the American Institute of Architects and Gray Magazine.